Mile 59

What's In a Name?

Speeding down the freeway doing 90. On our way to a festival. The less you know about that, the better. After all, life is about the journey, not the destination.
And the journey?
Philly to Virginia Beach. Windows down. Tunes blasting. Sunlight peering optimistically through the open roof. Concert tickets tucked discretely in the driver-side visor. A perfect morning in 1998.
We moved into the left lane to pass a lazy Buick, gave it a little gas and watched helplessly as our concert tickets fluttered, flapped and—as if somebody had opened the shuttle hatch—flew out the window, sucked into the vacuum of outer-space.
We lurched across the rumble strip and screeched to a halt. How far had the tickets gone? And how far had we gone?
We stood frozen next to the concrete barrier, looking backwards up the interstate, as rush hour hurtled past. It was a dizzy and dangerous moment.
Then, a brilliant breeze swept the shoulder. In the distance, a concert voucher skipped almost imperceptibly before landing flat again. We saw it happen. With velocity all around us, a moment frozen in time.
Running 100 feet against traffic, we found them, face up, looking auspiciously toward the highway marker for Mile 59.
Mile 59 is a moment of discovery; a revelatory stillness that brings clarity while the world moves with dizzying velocity; a marker of good fortune, best practice, and a vision for the almost imperceptible.

Mile 59 was founded by former high-frequency traders who believed that their knowledge and experience would help asset managers better navigate markets.

Our careers began building high-performance, low-latency trading systems and quantitative research platforms, developing expertise in the processing and analysis of the highest resolution, direct market data feeds and proprietary order routing data. Over the past 4 years, we have worked with asset managers on Best Execution, implementing best practices internally and evaluating broker order routing algorithms. We have helped design investor-focused stock exchanges. We have enhanced broker-dealers' order routing platforms and alternative trading systems. We have pushed regulators and legislators to improve transparency and access to data. We have developed proprietary metrics and machine learning techniques to help our clients reduce transaction costs and more efficiently use broker order routing algorithms. And we are dedicated to continuous improvement through our involvement in both academic research and industry-leading initiatives.

Learn from our experience and let us help you avoid common mistakes. Our firm is experienced and nimble. We can provide high-level guidance and roadmaps, or develop customized software and analytics. We will help you get moving much faster, with a unique set of resources. Leverage our firm’s decades of capital markets and quantitative experience to save money and move quickly.

Mile 59 Team

Dave Lauer

Dave Lauer has built a consulting career specializing in market structure, quantitative analysis of institutional order routing and technology development and architecture. Dave is also the Co-Founder and Chairman of Healthy Markets, a non-profit coalition of financial firms that seeks to improve disclosure and transparency in the industry while advancing data-driven market structure reforms.

Dave has extensive experience designing and building the infrastructure that underpins many modern electronic trading and matching systems. This experience includes designing and building large scale high-frequency trading platforms, quantitative research platforms, electronic order matching platforms and recently a robo-advisory order processing and web advice platform.

Dave sits on the board of Aequitas, an investor-focused Canadian stock exchange, as an Independent Director, and chairs the Regulatory Oversight Committee. Dave also sits on FINRA's Market Regulation Committee. Dave serves as an advisor to multiple technology startups, including Everettian (a quantum computing, machine learning company) and ercDex (a decentralized token trading platform). Dave's previous work includes technology architecture consulting for SEI, Verdande Finance and IEX Group, public advocacy at Better Markets, and electronic trading at Allston Trading and Citadel Investment Group. Dave also helped design and develop hardware-based low-latency trading technology for Tervela.

Nils Kilden-Pedersen

Nils has spent 23+ years developing software on a variety of platforms and industries. The past 16 years Nils has primarily developed software in the financial industry, ranging from mortgage banking to high-frequency algorithmic trading. Nils specialized in low latency, lock-free feed processing that scaled to millions of events per second. Nils is particularly interested in newer development and web technologies.

Nils sits on the Loyola CS/IT Program Advisory Committee and has authored and contributed to several open source projects.

Zak David

Zachary is a software engineer, data scientist, and quantitative trader with over a decade of experience designing and developing statistical software, sophisticated simulation environments, and automated trading systems deployed across a multitude of asset classes and exchanges. His most recent work as a market microstructure expert has focused on ensuring data quality and validation procedures while creating an industry-leading, distributed financial analytics platform used by institutional clients with assets exceeding 20 billion dollars.

He continues academic studies in mathematics and economics at Northwestern University and contributes research to the interdisciplinary AlgoFinance group at the Copenhagen Business School where his agent-based market simulation environment is being used to investigate models of trading ecosystems comprised of numerous, heterogeneous agents combining classical optimization techniques with original behavioral research.

Rachel Lauer

Rachel is a senior quantitative analyst and project lead with experience in economic modeling and operations research. Rachel's current work focuses on robo-advisors and development/ maintenance of investment advice models. Her past experience includes developing software systems to streamline research and processes at The Foundation Center and research work at NERA.

Rachel has a master's degree in Mathematical Finance from Boston University. Rachel is passionate about helping animals, and volunteers her time with local animal shelters.